AUSTIN — Hundreds of Central Texas students have experienced glitches with their tests on the first day of STAAR testing, various school officials confirmed to KVUE April 10.
A representative with the Texas Education Agency told KVUE that server issues caused a "temporary disruption in the STAAR online platform and only a few students were logged out and unable to log back in." Those server issues were resolved within 20 minutes. The problem was not statewide, the representative said.
The spokesperson did not know how many students and campuses were affected by the glitch. He told KVUE a total of 104,000 students took the test statewide April 10.
Austin Independent School District told KVUE about 900 students in their district were affected by the outage that started at 11:30 a.m. for them. Here's AISD's statement:
There was a minor glitch. The TEA online system temporarily displayed an error message and students were unable to continue testing. The outage occurred at approximately 11:30 and lasted about 20 minutes, after which testing resumed. Fewer than 900 AISD students were affected. We have no reason to believe test results were lost.
Tim Savoy with Hays Consolidated Independent School District said students there experienced similar problems. Lake Travis, Round Rock, Bastrop, Eanes, Georgetown, Manor and Taylor school districts were also affected.
Leander Independent School District said roughly 640 online test takers were locked out of the test for about 30 to 45 minutes. Students were able to re-enter the test to continue working and did not lose any of their work, according to the school.
In 2016, computer problems statewide affected more than 14,000 tests. The results for fifth- and eighth-graders were scrapped that year, according to The Texas Tribune.
The test, which was implemented in spring 2012, annually assesses reading and mathematics, writing, science, social studies, English, algebra, biology and U.S. history.
